The US homicide rate not using guns is also higher than many other country entire homicide rates.
Maybe the violence in the US is not simply guns?
We also jail our citizens vastly more than other countries, we have different social safety nets, we are a different age (more akin to all the Americas), and many other factors that show your view is missing relevant evidence.
In fact, gun ownership rates across civilized countries negatively correlates with overall homicide rates. Can you explain that also by your belief that guns are the main driver of violence? The same happens across US states, which have varying gun laws. And when analyzing violence before and after gun law changes across all countries, not simply poster child Australia, the picture is again much cloudier than you imply.
For example, the CDC study [1] done under Obama concluded that guns are used more often to deter crimes than are used for crimes. If this is true, it's entirely possible there is enough violence here regardless of guns that naive bans could cause more harm than not. You should read the study, not simply the parts you believe, to get a much better view on state of the art research on guns and violence in the US.
Easy to check yourself - find list of gun ownership by country, or by OECD, or by state. Find homicide rates for each, also easy. Put in excel or Google sheets, run a correlation.
>Well, no - they might have slightly different laws, but generally speaking firearms are wildly available everywhere.
Such a simplistic argument would then imply crimes, homicides with guns, etc., should be the same rate across states, and they are not. By your argument, no per state laws would have any effect, in which case they're useless. But this seems far from true.
So, if laws do have any effect, it should be detectable. Since the correlation for gun owner vs overall homicide rates point to the opposite direction, and it seems like that there are far more defensive gun uses, perhaps people are deterring some crime.
>Can you show me where it says that?
Page 15: "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010)."
Also, somewhat related, p16, "Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies".
No, it's a trade-off. Just like free speech. Banning free speech would "work" exactly as well for "fixing" exploitation. I think flatly making both of those trades against freedom is a mistake, just the same as doing nothing to address exploitation and gun violence are mistakes.
At this point there's no reasoning with people on gun control. It's an emotional thing. I want no more infringement period. Handguns at 21 was over the line. From here on out, I hope to see more Wacos until people understand that the 2A is not to be tested.
The Chicago handgun ban was struck down over a decade ago. Concealed carry has been allowed there for quite some time too. And its super easy to bring in guns from neighboring states with very lax laws.
We have a lack of a common culture in the US, and places like the South Side of Chicago are the fruits of the allegedly well-intentioned effort to destroy what little was left. Families with both parents are important.